Electorate Choice and Fertility Variability in Brazil: A Geo-Statistical Approach

Everton Lima, Centro de Desenvolvimento e Planejamento Regional (CEDEPLAR)
Eduardo L.G. Rios-Neto, Centro de Desenvolvimento e Planejamento Regional (CEDEPLAR)
Francesco Lagona, Max Planck Institute for Demographic Research

We study the relationship between electoral choice and fertility by using Brazilian data at a municipality level, during the military regime. We found a significant relationship between voting and fertility behavior, even after controlling for relevant confounding factors. We explain this relationship by interpreting electoral results as an indicator of a series of linked processes. First, the labor contracting system moves from family salary to individual basis payment. Second it can also be associated with a decline in the family norms, and the old communitarian cleavages ran by the power of colonel oligarchies that control the individual behavior; electoral changes may therefore indicate the beginning of a civil society with democratic values instead of the old “vote of cabresto”. We additionally model the spatial dependency of the data, which we interpret as the consequence of a communitarian and social learn process that spreads new reproductive behavior across Brazilian municipalities.